Sashenka

“Don’t get overconfident,” he said gruffly. “Comrade Snowfox, did you deliver the message to the safe house?”

“Yes.”

“Did you collect the pamphlets from the printing press?”

“Yes.”

“Where are they now?”

“In the apartment on the Petrograd Side. Shirokaya Street.”

“Tomorrow they need to reach the comrades at the Putilov Works.”

“I’ll do it. Usual arrangements?”

Mendel nodded. “You’re doing well, comrade.”

She looked so young when she smiled, and by the dim lantern of the mean little room Mendel noticed the little shower of freckles on either side of her nose. He knew from her quick replies that she wanted to tell him something. He decided to make her wait.

Her intensity made him feel like an old man suddenly, conscious of his skin like porridge speckled with broken veins, of the strands of grey in his greasy hair, of the aches of his arthritis. That was what exile and prison did for you.

“Dear comrade,” she said, “I can’t thank you enough for your teaching. Now everything fits. I never thought the words ‘comrade’ and ‘committee’ would excite me so much, but they do. They really do!”

“Don’t chatter too much,” he told her sternly. “And watch yourself with comrades. They know your background and they look for signs of bourgeois philistinism. Change the sable. Get a karakul.”

“Right. I feel that I’m a cog in a secret world, in the universal movement of history.”

“We all are, but in Piter at the moment you’re more important than you realize. We’ve so few comrades,” said Mendel, inhaling his cigarette, his red-rimmed eyes half closed. “Keep reading, girl. You can’t read enough. Self-improvement is the Bolshevik way.”

“The food shortages are getting worse. You’ve seen the lines? Everyone is grumbling—from the capitalists who come for lunch with Papa to comrades in the factories. Surely something will happen now?”

Mendel shook his head. “One day, yes, but not now. Russia still lacks a real proletarian class and without one, revolution isn’t possible. I’m not sure it’ll happen in our lifetimes. How can one jump the stages of Marxist development? It can’t happen, Sashenka. It’s impossible.”

“Of course. But surely—”

“Even Lenin isn’t sure we’ll live to see it.”

“You get his letters?”

Mendel nodded. “We’ve told him about the Smolny girl called Snowfox. How’s the family?”

She took a breath. Here it comes, he thought.

“Comrade Mendel,” she said, “I was arrested yesterday and spent the night at the Kresty.”

Mendel limped to the stove and, taking a greasy spoon, he leaned over the shchi soup and slurped a mouthful. The cigarette somehow remained hanging in the corner of his mouth.

“My first arrest, Uncle Mendel!”

He remembered his own first arrest twenty years ago, the appalled reaction of his father, the great Turbin rabbi, and his own pride on earning this badge of honor.

“Congratulations,” he told Sashenka. “You’re becoming a real revolutionary. Did the comrades of the cell committee take care of you?”

“Comrade Natasha looked after me. I didn’t know you were married.”

Sometimes Sashenka was a real Smolny schoolgirl. “I’m married to the Party. Comrades are arrested every day and very few are released the next morning.”

“There’s something else.”

“Go on,” he said, leaning on the stove, an old exile’s trick to ease the ache of Arctic winter. He chomped on a hunk of cold sausage, cigarette miraculously still in position.

“I was interrogated for several hours by Gendarme Captain Peter Sagan.”

“Sagan, eh?” Mendel knew that Sagan was the Okhrana case officer assigned to finish off the Party. He moved back to the little table, dragging his heavy boot. As he sat down, the table creaked. Now he was concentrating, watching her face. “I think I’ve heard the name. What of him?”

“He was trying to lead me on, but Uncle Mendel,” she said, joining him at the table and gripping his arm, the Smolny schoolgirl again, “he prides himself on his humanity. He’s something of a bourgeois liberal. I know I’m a neophyte but I just wanted to inform you—and the Petrograd Committee—that he seemed keen to be my friend. Naturally I gave him no encouragement. But at the end, he said he would like to meet me again and continue our conversation—”

“About what?”

“Poetry. Why are you smiling, Uncle Mendel?”

“You’ve done well, comrade,” Mendel said, thinking this new development through.

Sagan, a penniless nobleman, was a slick and ambitious policeman who specialized in turning female revolutionaries. But he might well be sympathetic to the Left, because the secret police knew how rotten the regime was better than anyone. It could be a signal, a trick, a seduction, a betrayal—or just an intellectually pretentious policeman. There were a hundred ways it could play out and Sashenka understood none of them, he thought.

“What if he does approach me?” she asked.

“What do you think?” answered Mendel.

“If he comes up to me in the street, I’ll tell him never to talk to me again and curse him for good measure. Is that what you want me to do?”